Narrow Results

A key focus for entrepreneurial development strategies for many economies is to facilitate sustainable and inclusive growth that will create jobs and reduce poverty. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is confronted with institutional challenges in bringing these objectives into fruition. We draw from institutionalism and entrepreneurial governance theory to explore institutional context and challenges to entrepreneurial development and inclusive growth in Africa. We theorize that entrepreneurial governance and public policy must focus on policy direction, enterprise enabling institutions for nascent entrepreneurs, seed funding and local embeddedness to eliminate institutional voids. We provide a dynamic view of institutional context and offer a policy framework to uncover challenges to entrepreneurial emergence and sustainable development in Africa. The study submits that enabling entrepreneurial activities for inclusive growth and sustainable development in Sub-Saharan Africa requires the right institutional and supporting ecosystem.

The traditional macroeconomic approach to poverty alleviation in neighborhoods and communities is to use housing development and job-creation programs to address the income and the opportunity gaps. Entrepreneurship is a much less used poverty alleviation strategy that, in our estimation, can have a significant effect in favorable policy environments. After a brief literature review, we highlight policy approaches that use entrepreneurship as a poverty alleviation strategy. We present several case studies from the United States as evidence of how public policy can empower an entrepreneurial ecosystem to support the self-employed and other low-income entrepreneurs. We conclude with a framework for how public policy can alleviate poverty through entrepreneurship that is generalizable in other contexts.

All other parts of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in any country are governed by the political and legal aspects of the system. This study examines the integrated effect of the entrepreneurial ecosystem’s political-legal subsystem on the performance of MSEs based on system theory and the mediating role of entrepreneurial competence, based on a resource-based view. There has been no detailed examination of the entrepreneurial ecosystem of MSEs in Africa in general, and Ethiopia in particular. Although the political-legal aspects of the entrepreneurial ecosystem have a major effect on both entrepreneurial competency and MSE’s performance, the relationship between entrepreneurial competencies and MSE performance was found to be insignificant. The role of entrepreneurial competency in mediating the relationships between policy and business performance and other business environments and business performance was shown to be insignificant. The study suggests that the policies designed by the government for MSEs should be flexible enough to affect other aspects of the entrepreneurial environment, such as the economic and social dimensions. Finally, additional studies in the field are encouraged to clarify the discrepancies in the findings concerning the relationships between entrepreneurial competencies and the performance of SMEs.

This article examines the effects of the Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) policy on black entrepreneurship in South Africa. The BBBEE policy is a legal framework aimed at addressing historical inequalities by promoting equal opportunities and encouraging the participation of black individuals in the economy. The policy highlights include increased access to funding for previously marginalized groups to start and grow their businesses, improved market access to encourage large businesses to partner with small businesses owned by previously marginalized groups, and increased skills and development. Using the policy as a quasi-natural experiment, the study adopts a difference-in-difference estimation technique contrasting periods before and after implementation and measuring its effectiveness on black entrepreneurial entry. Results from the analysis indicate that the policy was ineffective in improving black entrepreneurship in South Africa.

Social enterprises have intense interaction with their local communities and “are explicitly committed to generating social value in perpetuity” (Katz & Page, 2010). They bring cohesiveness and trust to their host communities and they are the civil society’s way of becoming the “primary stakeholders” (Cornwall, 2003) in development agendas. These are the aspects of societal living that Ostrom (2008) demonstrates through her research on local self-reliance and the development of a concerned civil society, which takes initiative for the management of its own resources. The analysis done in this chapter demonstrates the interplay of the social enterprise and public policy. Ostrom’s (2008) framework of seven design principles, which provide a normative reference for local self-governance initiatives, is mapped onto four social enterprise cases, selected for their extent of community engagement and self-regulation. This chapter follows a case-based methodology, with an analysis of four diverse types of social enterprises, within the Indian context. A discussion of the design principles, within the social enterprise framework, is followed by the analysis of these cases. Each of the enterprises has a different level and style of community engagement and we use the design principles to demonstrate the effectiveness of their community participation. The case analysis demonstrates a way for policymakers to integrate and support the social enterprise as a crucial part of participatory development. Moreover, it aids entrepreneurs in evaluating the degree to which their host communities are invested in a truly participatory experience.